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26 April, 2007

“With my portraiture I try to carve out a memory, telling a story with our modern lives. With dramatic shadows, the background becomes blended with the foreground, losing a large section of the information for the viewer; their mind puts the rest of the information in without it being there. A moment becomes frozen, a tangible memory.”http://www.wingedlionpress.com.au

Julianna Joos was born in Montreal, Quebec. In her thirty years as a professional artist, she has had fifteen solo exhibitions and has participated in more than a hundred group shows around the world.http://www.julianna.jujoos.net/

24 April, 2007

The Arts EdNet tutorial could be for you if you are a primary or secondary Visual Arts educator and: you haven't used the Internet much;you want to find out what the Internet has to offer teachers and students;you want to use the Internet as part of your curriculum.

Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler, Bitch Magazine founders and editors of BITCHFest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine, join up with Lynn Peril, author of College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, and Bitch contributor Margaret Price, for a smart, nuanced, cranky, outrageous and clear-eyed exploration of the places where feminism and pop culture intersect, interact, and sometimes collide.

The National Gallery of Australia has more than 100,000 works in its collection - from decorative arts to photography and sculpture - but only a fraction of these can be exhibited at one time. In this series of micro-docs, former director of the gallery Betty Churcher presents an insider's guide to some of the "hidden treasures" that are rarely on public display. From her unique vantage point, she makes intriguing connections between a range of artworks and artists. These are fascinating tales - about the works themselves, the people who created them and the challenge of preserving them - and a tantalising look at some of the ideas and influences that have shaped modern art across the globe.

20 April, 2007

The Holland Paper Biennial will be held for the sixth time from 10 June - 10 September 2006 and will be exhibited at two museums: Museum Rijswijk and the CODA Museum, Apeldoorn.

A wide selection of works by 22 artists will be on show throughout the premises of Museum Rijswijk, while large-scale work, installations and artist’s books by 20 artists will be exhibited at the CODA Museum.

The artists selected for this Holland Paper Biennial all work closely with the material paper. For some the starting point is pure fibre, while others make their own pulp from a mixture of fibres. A number of artists use handmade or industrially produced paper, which is worked by means of presses, perforations, folding or cutting.

The posters were devised, printed and distributed by a group of architects and interior designers working in the Government Architects office, Sydney, early 1967, as part of the movement to have Jorn Utzon returned as architect of the Sydney Opera House following his 'forced' resignation in February 1966. The donors were both architects in the GA's office at the time and assisted with poster printing and distribution.

The posters were printed from [silk screens) designed and made by John Kinstler, an architect in the Government Architects office, and Karen Herrle, an interior designer also with the Government Architect. The posters were printed at Kinstler's home in Paddington or at Bill Turner's home in Balmain by a group of architects including Kinstler, Turner as well as May Watson and Ted Mack. The font style of the central letters was based on printing blocks salavaged from the Government Printing Office when it closed down.http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection

Lucy Lippard is the American feminist writer whose essays certainly have changed the way we�ve looked at, and have come to understand art since the 1970s.

In the 7th in our Exhibit A series, Changing The Way We See, we focus on two of Lippard�s books: From The Centre and Get The Message, which include her essays on female imagery, the women�s art movement, feminism and art, political posters -- as well as a conversation with American feminist artist Judy Chicago, who brought her famous, large installation, The Dinner Party, to Australia in 1980s.http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/s1351735.htm

[PUBLIC] _____ curating is an ongoing research-project by the Vienna-based organisation CONT3XT.NET, collecting methods, resources, and theories concerning the changing conditions of curatorial practices on the Web. The blog is an experimental database of international curating projects, theoretical approaches and a resource for curatorial platforms, art-databases and contemporary ways of New Media Curating.

With the changing of the production and reception of art on the Internet, not only the art itself changed but also the possibilities of curation and thus require new forms of investigation and communication too. During the past decade the concept of what was called "Curating (on) the Web" (1) already in 1998, has changed into a multifaceted and interrelative communication-process between artists, theorists, writers and "normal" Internet-users -- nowadays curators are described as "cultural context providers" (2), "meta-artists" (3), "power users" (4), "filter feeders" (5) or simply as "proactive consumers" (6).

It is hoped a series of tiny dots will protect thousands of Australian Indigenous artworks and artists from fraud and exploitation.

Former Northern Territory government minister Peter Toyne is an executive with Alice Springs-based company IdenteArt, which developed the technology alongside the CSIRO.

The artwork is protected by microscopic dots that stores information about the artist and the gallery or art centre where the work was made.

The information will then be stored on a national database held in trust by the Federal Government.

The dots are either sprayed onto a tamper-proof label or directly onto the works themselves.

Dr Toyne says about 12,000 Indigenous artworks are in the process of being protected by the dots.

"The glory of it is that it's so flexible that you can actually spray this code onto basketware or pottery or boomerangs or didgeridoos as well as embodying it into a label attached to the back of paintings," he said.

Dr Toyne says the industry had to develop a solution to the unethical practices in the Indigenous art world.

"There'll be a fence line thrown up around 3,500 artists and 12,000 Indigenous works of art initially, and that fence line defines safety and fair returns for their work compared to the rest of the market, which will have all of the collection of ethical and unethical trading," he said.

Bill Viola has been producing influential art using film and video for more than two decades, exploring themes of time, consciousness, and self-perception in works that are rooted in both Asian and Western art and mystical traditions. Inspired by medieval and Renaissance devotional paintings, Bill Viola explores ways in which the face and body can express an endless range of emotional states in The Passions . This video features the artist at work on this series.

For the 6th international Biennial of Engraving, 65 participants were chosen out of 500 files and 50 different countries. The expansion to some regions never represented so far, strengthens the international position of this Biennial : 22 countries will be represented by one or more artistic ambassadors. The admission, without age limit and open to all technics permits the presentation of a wide panorama of the art of printmaking as it is practised today, through 400 works on paper exhibited at the MAMAC.

The Festival of Engraving, proposing about thirty activities, testifies of the vitality of the art of printmaking and confirms at the same time a well anchored tradition in the Liege region since the 16th century.

17 April, 2007

"Women in Art must look to the future as they have no past" said Mary Cecil Allen at an opening of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1935.

Far from having no past, Australian women now confront many pasts, provided by both commercial and public galleries. Publications and exhibitions centreing upon women's art especially of pre-1945 vintage have proliferated since c.1991-1992.

Any consideration of women's art in Australia, contemporary or historic, must take into account this renewed emphasis upon exhibiting and promoting historic women's art. I append a considerable list of various events and publications.

Here is an interesting shift in curatorial philosophies since the 1980s. Women had no stated prominence in the major exhibitions generated by "official" celebrations of the Bicentennial. (1) Excellent pieces by various women were seen in Creating Australia, The Artist and the Patron or The Face of Australia, for example, but women's art practice was not a central or exclusive issue for any of these shows.

History, rediscovering, 'taking back' women's 'lost heritage', had been a staple of 1970s feminism. An article in Lip on the 1978 exhibition Women's Images of Women vividly documents the philosophies and emotions that forged 1970s 'feminist' art history. (2) Beyond the affirmations a certain tension arose between mainstream definitions and use of historic art and the independent curators/artists/feminists' search for 'founding mothers'.

The image used on the poster for Alexis Hunter's show Radical Feminism in the 1970s seems almost a parody of aggressive masculinity.

By Adam Gifford

It's a side-on shot of a male torso, naked from the waist up, leather trousered below, hand on hip holding a cigarette, New York's twin towers in ghostly shadow behind.

Treating the male as a sexual object was unusual in the early 1970s when the photo was taken.

"There is always a journey to making a piece of work," says Hunter, now back in her home in Camden, London, after spending the summer in New Zealand.

The photos were source material for a photo-realist painting now owned by the Auckland City Art Gallery, and on loan to a survey of feminist art touring North America. Her original impetus was a study of European tattoos embarked on when she arrived in London in 1972, after studying painting at Elam.

"I heard a lecture at the Royal Academy which described tattooing in a very denigrating way - that it was primitive. I was angry because I know from New Zealand culture that tattooing was a very important part of Maori social structure.

"After the lecture I decided to go out on to the street and take photos of people with tattoos, and ask why they had them. That was the project. Sometimes you do something because you are interested, and the art comes later."

When she showed the tattoo photos, she was challenged for taking sexist photos of men.

"That's because when you take a close shot of an arm by the side, you take in the pelvis. I thought, how can you take a sexist picture of a man if men have that power in society? Sexism comes from being in a position to look at a person and make them into an object. Art history does that to women."

Hunter looked further at the new feminist ideas about what words like sexism mean.

"It was just at the beginning of talking about those things. A lot of us were working in the dark. People think you get art from ideas but the fact is the art is the idea. Sometimes the painting is the theory. The way people look at it completes the theory."

Interest in early feminist art has prompted requests for Hunter to dig into her archives.

"There was a lot of interest a couple of years ago in early conceptual art, so the feminist art came just after that and is seen as part of that movement," she says.

"In the 1970s we felt empowered to change society, and thought we could do so by making art. People now don't feel that, and they want to learn how we did it."

Part of how Hunter did it was remembering the lessons of her tutor and mentor at Elam, painter Colin McCahon.

"Though my work does not look like his, I think it follows his ethics in the sense that you have to see yourself as a social being in society and that you have responsibilities as an artist."

She says the Art of the Feminist Revolution show, which opened in Los Angeles last month, "has people so excited because the work is so raw, so hard, so to the point. Some of the stuff cannot be surpassed in the way of bravery or breaking taboos".

Artists like Hunter used themselves as raw material to explore how the culture controlled how women could look and behave. "We were ridiculed in the press. We couldn't get work."

She says friends coming to the end of tenured careers in art schools have offered her sorts of apologies for not getting her jobs. "They said, 'We couldn't, you were a feminist artist'."

She also encountered problems getting her images printed, including one of a woman cutting her nails with a razor blade and another of a woman burning a pair of silver high heel shoes.

"A few were out of focus because I was using focus to suggest intellectual awakening. When I took them to the printer, they would refuse to do them because they suspected they were feminist work. They would claim they could not print out of focus work. I would have to take the manager out for a drink and get them done at night."

The Whitespace show is a small selection from a large survey last year at the Norwich Gallery in England.

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) will present the first comprehensive exhibition in Japan of the works of Marlene Dumas (born in Cape Town in 1953), a female artist who creates and exhibits internationally.

Raised in apartheid South Africa, Dumas studied art at Cape Town University in the 1970s, an era when radical aesthetics rocked art to its foundations. Since 1976 she has made Amsterdam her base. Taking as subject matter her lovers, daughter and friends, or else images of people found in the media, her portraits have a suggestive character, highly provocative of the viewer’s imagination, and they document our society with disturbing honesty. To portraits and representation of the human body, traditional subjects in painting, she brings contemporary sensibilities and a forceful reality. Strongly influenced by photography and movies in her depiction of real human emotion, Dumas is restoring vitality to the painted image, as if by recombining the DNA of other media.

Because of her cultural background in South Africa, Dumas stands at a distance from Western culture and has readily absorbed references from African and Japanese art. Her existential approach to her subject, unbiased by culture, and her openness to references, as such, have engendered her unusual style.

Ceaselessly changing in her work, Dumas applies her individualistic interpretation of painting in depicting discrimination, prejudice, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and so on, thereby producing a social portrait rich in the complexity that defines our times. In this exhibition—together with “Banality of Evil” (1984) and other examples of her brightly colored, bewitching oil portraits of the 1980s; her renowned grouped-portrait series, “Female” (1992-1993), consisting of 217 drawings; and her nude portrait series—MOT will display works from her latest series, “Man Kind” (2002 – 2006), dealing with mistaken identities and fears concerning global terrorism.

As befits a presentation of Dumas works in Japan, the exhibition will reflect, in its composition, the artist’s interest and involvement in this country. Her new work “Broken White,” from which the exhibition title derives, will be displayed along with the Nobuyoshi Araki monochrome photograph that served as its model and also a Ukiyo-e print by Yoshitoshi Tsukioka (1839-1792), whose grotesque world of Eros resonates with Dumas’s works and strongly caught her interest. The first exhibition in Japan to introduce the full scope of Dumas’s chief works—through 150 works, including some 10 new creations—Broken White will precede major Marlene Dumas retrospectives scheduled for 2008 at Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Named after one of three sacred rock holes near Tjukurla that has special significance to the women of the region, Tjarlirli Art was formed in June 2006 out of a desire to draw people back to their birthplace from the communities of Docker River (to the south) and Kiwirrkura (to the north). The paintings will be available for viewing on the web from 17 April.

We start our year with this charming exhibition of work by acclaimed artists of this genre includes Bessie Liddle, Peggy Jones, Billy Benn and other great work from the communities of Titjikala, Julalikari, Bindi, Tjampi, Hermannsburg and Ikuntji. The work represents a serene world of simplicity, scenes of everyday life, country and memories depicted with a love of colours and shapes.:: BESSIE LIDDLE:: Titjikala:: Bindi:: Ikuntji:: Julalikari:: Hermannsburg

Whilst I note that the Australian record on wikipedia is largely as yet unwritten, I also note with concern that the current information presents an unfavourably biased paradigm particularly in relation to indigenous affairs.

10 April, 2007

For MONUMENTA 2007, Anselm Kiefer is dedicating the group of new works presented in the nave of the Grand Palais to the poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.http://www.monumenta.com/2007

MONUMENTA is a new contemporary art event providing leading international artists with the opportunity to engage with the great steel-and-glass nave of Paris's Grand Palais, through the creation of a series of totally new installations. Reflecting the extraordinary dynamism of the international contemporary art scene, MONUMENTA is a unique opportunity to discover the work of some of today's greatest living artists. This remarkable annual event will showcase, in alternate years, the work of French artists (or artists living in France) and artists from around the world.=========

Culling materials and subjects from the streets, Swoon creates paper cutouts and installations that re-envision the experience of urban life. Inspired by historical sources ranging from German Expressionist woodblock prints to Indonesian shadow puppets, this New York–based artist has covered the city streets with her work for over six years. She has exhibited most recently in P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center’s Greater New York 2005. In the summer of 2006, she participated in the “Miss Rockaway Armada” on the Mississippi River.